2013 was quite a year for me, plus I haven’t done a proper podcast in ages (literally over 2 years…), so I decided to do an overview of my year, covering the Channel A and Golden Sky Stories Kickstarters, Maid RPG, Fate and Adventures of the Space Patrol, Destiny Dice, Beyond Otaku Dreams, and a few other odds and ends.

This podcast uses selections from the song “Click Click” by Grünemusik, available for free from Jamendo.com. If you like the song, consider buying some CDs from Nankado’s website.

This special episode is a compilation of the first six months of the “Today in Geek History” daily podcast I’ve been posting on Tumblr. I’ve been working on a humor book titled “I Want to be an Awesome Robot,” and one rather large section of it is a calendar with a fake fact about the history of geekdom for every single day of the calendar year, plus one or two days I made up. I does have plenty of RPG stuff in it (including the tale of Gary Gygax’s quest for the Rod of Seven Dice), though there’s also entries relating to anime, video games, sci-fi, literature, science, history, and more besides. Filling up 365 days is hard, especially when you make it so that it’s actually 379. The whole thing is a bit over an hour and a half, though on the plus side you can now listen all the way through without clicking on dozens and dozens of individual Tumblr posts, most of which are less than a minute long. Expect another similar compilation episode in January 2014!

If you know me at all, you know that I’m really random about when I get inspired to actually do things, such that I jump from project to project all the time. The other day I got inspired to revive my project to do an iRiff of Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, which in turn led me to get some better recording gear, which in turn inspired me to get back into podcasting. This first new episode is a recap of what I’ve been up to in terms of my own game design and translation projects. There’s quite a bit to cover. I started using Audacity (which is quite good), and didn’t feel like messing around trying to get the music in this time around, so for better or for worse this episode is an hour of just my voice.

I became acquainted with Malcolm Harris because we’d both been invited as guests of honor for A-Kon (an anime convention in Dallas) in 2010. He’s the driving force behind Channel-M Publishing, an independent publisher of comics and RPGs, including Witch Girls Adventures. I’ve met very few people who are quite so passionate about creating and sharing their creations, and his enthusiasm is wonderfully infectious.

We finally got around to connecting on Skype to record a podcast, and Malcolm shared his insights on Witch Girls Adventures and how with it he’s designed and marketed a role-playing game aimed at teenage girls. He also talks a bit about the Witch Girls movie short he’s working on, as well as other games (Macho and Nemesis: Remix) and forthcoming Witch Girls supplements. He’s a really busy guy, to put it mildly.

Nemesis: Remix, a superhero RPG for fans of superhero comics, due out in late 2012

Even more stuff on the horizon for Channel M!

Malcolm says believe in your self!

Technical Notes
The technical quality of the recording wasn’t quite what I hoped; my voice is too loud, while Malcolm’s is too quiet (usually it’s the other way around) and has just enough of a background hum that it’s hard to boost without reducing the audio quality. (Plus you can hear me breathing far more than I’d like.) I hope you’ll bear with me all the same, because this is probably my most interesting podcast episode so far.